Joe Schaeppi is the CEO and co-founder of Solsten and is on a mission to fundamentally change the way that humans connect. With a strong background in psychology, he leverages his expertise in human behavior and motivation—gained from leading UX strategy at McCann and his impactful work as an adventure-based psychotherapist—Joe is pioneering the use of video games for cognitive assessment, which opens up new possibilities for patient retention, preventative care, and even mental health diagnostics and treatment.

🎮 Tune in to discover how Solsten's data-driven insights reveal what truly makes players tick, capturing 400+ psychological data points related to desires, motivations, values, and personality traits. Joe and his team empower developers to understand player behavior, enhance personalization, and effectively target market segments. Their mission is to create games that resonate deeply with players, fostering emotional connections and driving engagement.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn: 

• The Importance of Avoiding Biases
• Sustainable and Successful Game Development Through Player Centric Psychology and Data Insights
• Advice on Building Engaging Games and Successful Enterprises.
  

Resources Mentioned in this episode

• Here’s Waldo Recruiting
• Lizzie Mintus on LinkedIn
• Joe Schaeppi on Linkedin
• Solsten

Episode Transcript

Welcome to the Here's Waldo Podcast, where we sit down with top visionaries and creatives in the video game industry. Together we'll unravel their journeys and learn more about the path they're forging ahead. Now, let's get started with the show.

Lizzie Mintus: Hi, I'm Lizzie Mintus, the founder and CEO of Here's Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique game and tech recruitment firm, and this is the Here's Waldo Podcast. In every episode, we dive deep into conversations with creatives and founders and executives about their journey. You can expect to hear valuable lessons and get a glimpse into the future of the industry. 

This episode is brought to you by Harris Waldo Recruiting. We are a boutique recruitment firm for the game and tech industries. And we value quality over quantity, transparency, communication, and diversity.

Before introducing today's guest, I want to give a big thank you to Olga for introducing us. Olga is BD queen and such a great connector. We were just fanning about you before the show. So thank you. 

Today we have Joe Schaeppi with us. Joe is the founder and CEO of Solsten and is on a mission to fundamentally change the way that humans connect. Armed with his experience leading UX strategy for McCann and his impactful work as an adventure based psychotherapist, Joe is pioneering the use of video games for cognitive assessment, Which opens up new possibilities for patient retention, preventative care, and even mental health diagnostics and treatment.

Let's get started. Thank you for being here today, Joe. 

Joe Schaeppi: Thanks, Lizzie. 

Lizzie Mintus: I want to start by talking about your state of the player report. Can you share a little bit more about what that is? 

Joe Schaeppi: So Solsten, about six and a half years ago or so, we set out to really fundamentally change how we do psychological diagnostics, how we understand people, and part of that was going into gaming. So basically what we built is this really cool combination of kind of classic, adaptive computerized testing, like if you've ever taken the SAT or ACT before, where the questions are like changing as you answer them. So that's one thing we do. And then we use also the gameplay and how people play to be able to understand their psychology.

It's really like the only accurate way of understanding psychology on the internet. When we play, we're just more authentic. There's a saying from adventure based psychotherapy, which is like, show me how you play and I'll tell you who you are. Where social media is kind of the opposite, people are just trying to like be something else, do something else.

So year over year, basically we're collecting, through different games we're in. And we work with everybody from like EA to Activision, you name it. There's a lot of big groups there, a lot of big games. But as we're understanding people anonymously, and that's the key point, we never attach what we do to personal identity. We get this really cool picture of how people change year over year. 

And so our state of the player report, what it was is, and one way to look at it is kind of like during COVID and after COVID, because that was last year and the year before. And so we released this report. I think we included about a sample size of 500,000 people. The reality when you do statistics at scale as like 500,000 is, you don't get more by adding more sometimes. There's only 8 billion of us on earth. Only 4 billion of us use smartphones and 3 billion of US game. So it's kind of like our reality. 

So we compared a sample size of about 250,000 people from, what was it, 2022 to 2023, and then 250 from 2023. And we looked at, not what changed behaviorally, because that's like, we went out of houses and we're more outside. That stuff's very transparent, but how did we change internally. And I think one of the coolest things that came out of that state of the player report, overall, we actually saw just human levels of altruism fundamentally increase. 

So people became more helpful. And it's not like it's a short-lived thing. Personality is not something you easily shift or change. And so it's kind of cool to see things like that, from during pandemic to after pandemic. Yeah, people became more altruistic.

There's a lot of other really interesting stuff in the report. We break it down by like demographics, all the things you would normally expect and you get to actually see how personality shifted or change within those groups and also what stayed, cause that's just as interesting, I think as what changes.

Lizzie Mintus: What stayed?

Joe Schaeppi: I'll leave that for the report. Cause when you read, for example, the baby boomer generation and you see the stuff that stayed there. You're like, okay. Or when you read like the Gen Z group and some of the things that stayed, you'll also be like, okay, yeah, I got it. So I'll leave that for the report. And I'll let people guess. But yeah, you can download it , no problem on our site. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's such a good cliffhanger. It's exactly what we'll be doing after this.. 

Joe Schaeppi: That's our job, right? 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, you're doing it well. So you help companies understand the player profiles and then it breaks it down by region demographic. What are kind of the core buckets that you break people into. 

Joe Schaeppi: Sure. So I would say we're kind of like the opposite of buckets in many ways. It's like human beings. If you think of things like Myers Briggs, for example, there's an interesting book called the personality brokers that talks about all the interesting things about that, the problems, et cetera. But there's not like 16 types of people. So people are not really bucketable.

So what Solsten does and the thing is, demographics and behavior is very problematic as well. So if you try to put people into demographic groups, the perfect example is typically like Ozzy Osbourne and King Charles. They're the same age. They come from the same country. They're the same nationality. They're in the same income tier. They're literally demographically identical. But if you were building a game, if you were building an experience for Ozzie versus King Charles, it probably would be pretty different.

And I always just try to distill it as like, if information is useful for you, how good of a gift could you buy that person? Cause your end goal when you buy a gift for somebody is delight. Most of the times and delight is when that person's expectations have been positively negated. So like you've gone beyond expectations. It was just this incredible thing. And so, okay. If I have all of these demographics, if I have King Charles demographics, could I buy a gift for them? Well, we'd end up getting the same gift. If all we knew was the demographics and okay, we'd probably get something different for Ozzy versus King Charles. 

And then behavior, so let's say we start tracking their behavior. All right, now that's a little more interesting. Like Ozzy's at concerts. He's doing shows. We kind of see some different information, but they're both on stages from time to time. They're both talking in front of groups of people. And the thing about behavior is it shifts a lot. 

So when I'm in Minneapolis, when I'm in New York, or when I'm with a team in Berlin, my eating habits change. I'm not eating kebabs in New York or Minneapolis. I am in Berlin for sure. How I walk, how much I'm moving around. That definitely shifts. It's more in New York, probably than Minneapolis within the city. But overall it's probably more in Minneapolis because I'm more in the forests here and lakes. And then in Berlin, though, I'm walking all the time. 

And so behavior just really changes. So when you look at behavior, you get a lot of noise. So where Solsten kind of works from is basically using clinical psychology as a baseline. So we're understanding about 200 different psychological traits. Some of these things, people are familiar with. Many people are familiar with the ocean model of openness, extroversion, conscientiousness, etc. And then there's sub facets from those like gregariousness, for example.

So we're measuring a lot of those. And what's nice about the ocean model is it's just, it's very well studied. There's a lot of research behind it, but then there's things like intrinsic motivators. So we measure about 18 of those. We measure about 72 values. Values are really interesting. They change a bit more than your personality. 

Maybe you value friendship a lot when you're in your twenties and then you have a family and now you value family more, but people spend time and money on the things they value most. So what we do is we essentially, we look at an audience. So maybe it's a game. We go in, we measure the psychology of a lot of people that are playing that game. We're talking typically tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of players in that game. And then once we've done that, our algorithm basically plays. 

So you could think of it like, at the end might feel like buckets, but it's actually the opposite of buckets. What it's doing is it's looking at that unique group of people and it's basically saying who's psychologically similar. And so what's important about that is psychological similarity, it's much more concrete over time.

If you look at extroversion as a psychological trait, by the time you're 90, you'll be a little less extroverted a little, like it tends to slightly go down over time, but not very much. It doesn't change that much. Your demographics are definitely going to change. Your behavior is definitely also going to change. So our psychology, our cognition, our personality, a lot of these things, they're just more enduring than behavior or demographics are. 

And they also tell us way more about who we are. If someone's like really extraverted and they value friendship and entrepreneurship, let's say it's not a big leap to say, Hey, if we gather a bunch of people around and have some sort of party, and there's a lot of people that are maybe really good friend type people and it's around entrepreneurship. Oh, by the way, they also value the environment and nature. Okay, we're not going to do it inside. We're going to do it outside. You can start stacking. That and all of a sudden the person goes, Oh, this is for me. This was meant for me. 

Lizzie Mintus: That's for me. That's for me personally.

Joe Schaeppi: Amazing. Yeah. So you could see the opposite of that too. Imagine you just change one trait. You just change extroversion to introversion. It's similar. I can meet friends, but online, I can be in my little library in my room that I have where I'm like by myself and I can kind of safely do that or I can be reading my book. And that's my first step towards that. 

I think it's just that one thing can really mean a big difference. So the way I describe how our platform works then is we're basically looking at these almost like Harry Potter groups that are generating, themselves generating from the audience. So you kind of know, like it could be three like minded groups of people. It could be 20 like minded groups of people. It really depends on that audience. 

What comes out of that and then what the developer is getting, what the product team, what the marketing team is getting, is this just deep understanding of their audience that they can actually make useful for the products they're making, the ads they're building, because they're not just trying to guess from demographic or behavior data anymore. They know exactly what to do. 

So we'll see when teams build ads off of Solsten data, like Tilting Point, mobile game companies, like SpongeBob Godzilla, lots of stuff. They get like 300 percent better win rates when they build ads using Solsten. Or when teams like Supercell go out and build events, their events will perform 20 to 30 percent better than their average events because the team, it's not that you're taking away the creativity, you're literally just empowering it. You're giving them the baseline. 

Think if you give a really creative person, Ozzy Osbourne's personality and his values and all those kind of things. They're going to come up with something really interesting that would probably blow his mind, you know, for a birthday present, so to say.

Lizzie Mintus: I like that. I like your Harry Potter categorization too. That's a good way of putting it. 

So at what point can a company start to use Solsten? When are they too early? 

Joe Schaeppi: Never. 

Lizzie Mintus: Let's focus on games, right? You have a playable demo and you're getting feedback hopefully as early as possible because you've learned from the game industry's mistakes. Do you need to have a certain data set size to make it matter or just start as early as possible, collect the data and iterate based on that? 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah. So by the time you have a playable, I would say in how competitive things are right now, you are already too late. So I think what's important is, the majority of games that are releasing and just like in the Western market, so Europe and US, that are releasing and doing incredibly well, right now used Solsten. It was a part of their process. 

And so the problem is, if you're already at a playable, the room for indie games to really break out and really make it, it's just getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller because it's getting more and more and more and more competitive. And it's a good thing. It's a mature market. It's not because the indie games, where they're not doing the right things. It's just the market's so much more competitive. And what's cool about Solsten is, I mean, even an indie game company can use Solsten. We have an accelerator program that goes to that.

So what that is, it's our product called, Navigator. So Navigator is the largest psychological database in the world. There's representative audiences of over 200,000 games in that database. What's so cool about that is you can take an idea like, Hey, we're thinking about these mechanics with this theme, with this art style. And we can go and look in our database and say, yeah, here's the players that we know, like those mechanics, like that theme and like that art style, and we can come back to you and we can literally show the total addressable market for that their average monthly spend on games. 

So one of the biggest problems we see with games being developed today is they'll absolutely crush it for a very small, total addressable market.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. 

Joe Schaeppi: And then we'll see things like, we know we were doing so well. And then something happened and Google and Facebook and targeting it. No, no. That's not what it is. When Solsten comes in at that stage, cause they'll bring us in, we'll look at their audience. And I'll be like, yeah, your total addressable market is literally 7 million people globally. No matter what you did, you're just at the ceiling and you're never going to scale the game and we'll hear from entrepreneurs like our return on ad spend was so good. Our LTV was so good. Our our poo poo was so good. And it's like, yeah, because you're building for this really niche group of people.

And the thing is like bigger companies like EA can't think that way because for them, for a game to meaningfully produce revenue- and this is sometimes when like game teams get upset, they're like, our game was canceled. Boo. The game was so amazing. It probably was so amazing. The problem is from a business perspective for it to make sense for EA, it has to generate a certain level of revenue.

So if you don't want to be subject to that, work for an indie or a smaller developer, but then you're also subject to other problems. And so the best time to really start is when you're exploring different ideas, different themes, different art styles. And what's going to happen is it's going to start to guide that process.

So you're going to understand, like maybe a good example is a game called PAX Day. It's made by a company called the Mainframe. Sulka, who's amazing. He was one of the main people that did the Yvonne line. So from day one, they basically started with, we're going to build for MMO, but this specific type of MMO people and this specific persona in MMO. So they already knew the persona that was like the biggest market size with the highest average monthly spend. And they had that audience. And when they started building the game, we did something called resonance testing. So when they're doing play tests, things like that, what's powerful is they can actually see which people in the play tests are which persona. 

So back when I was in Seattle at Big Fish Games, we would do play tests and there were play tests I would get done with. And I was like, none of these people are our ideal players. Yeah they play the games, but this is just bad data. And we would have people say, I love your Mojang games. We're like, we don't make Mojang games, you know? 

And so what's more important though, is we had this with another company that has a hit game out right now on Switch, where the CEO actually saw the personas. And he was like, I'm persona number six, like to a tee. I was reading its personality. I was reading its traits and that the market size is only 2 million people globally. So he was like, I just realized all the feedback I'm giving as the CEO that I'm pushing us towards, he's like, I play these games. I'm this type of player. I love these games. It's like, yeah, you've built a billion dollar company before. You're not a normal person. You're not the average person. 

So the stuff that was intrinsically, just, this is what you do in the game- for him was not also the things that were representative of the broader audience. And part of the reason they brought us in is because the game that they had before that didn't go so well. And it was built off of a lot of that instinct that had served them well in the past. It's just, it's a new playing field. 

So while you're going through that development process, it's so powerful to be able to see which personas, which psychological groups are actually the ones that are representative of that bigger market. And PAX data right now, they have an email list of, I think over 400,000 people or something like that. And they can literally say that over 70 percent of those people are their key persona in that list. So they already know. They know when they're going to launch, how big, we don't know, but it's going to lead to something.

Another good example is Monopoly Solitaire. The team, same thing. They use us from day one. And they were like, how much Solitaire versus how much Monopoly? What are those two? So they did make two prototypes. And it was all off of the specific audience that we had. And when they tested them, they were able to do that resonance testing. And actually the version that the team was hoping was going to win, did not win. It was the one that the team was really rooting for. But the one that did win, went on to become their second highest grossing product of all time.

And Klondike Solitaire is the largest solitaire game on the market. So for them, that's a really big win as a company to put out a new product. That's your second highest grossing product within the company, especially when you're a category or market leader and. After the fact, what was cool, that game designer for that game and that team, he uses us for everything now.

He's like, it just saves me so much time and money. And he's like, and my ideas are better, cause it's basically like the creative platform for me to know that what I come up with and what I create is going to hit the ground running when it goes to the market. Yeah. 

Lizzie Mintus: That makes sense. Takes the guessing out of it completely. 

Do you ever think about, like you said that the founder, the CEO of the company, their total addressable market or Tam is only 2 million. So do you think it makes sense even, maybe from building a founding team to figure out what Tam you're trying to target and who has traits that align with that, that you can hire? From my recruiting brain, that was what's going on.

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah, I think we've been asked that before. So you're definitely not the first person to ask that. I think definitely no. And here's why is, no matter what, even if you are really representative of the player, no matter what, and this is my UX background speaking, because I've been in UX a long time- you are not the player. Period. Anytime I hear someone say that in a game team, like, Oh, I play these games all the time. I'm like, cool, but you're not the player. 

Because think about a time when you've built something and maybe it was kind of complicated or something like that, then you had to go back and fix it. You knew exactly where those things were because you built it. The example I always use is my uncle used to race Jeeps. And he would work on that thing all the time. By the time he passed away, my cousin who's some certified like Ferrari mechanic, handled jeeps, no problem, opened up the hood. And he went to my cousin. He's like, what did your dad do in this thing? The whole engine was its own reality. It was all built out and a lot of game. 

Games get like that. And so the reality is, users are coming to this for the first time. Players are coming into games for the very first time. And one of the worst things you can do is be that person. Now, I think it's really good to have experience in that game, in that genre. That's great. However, I also have seen some really successful games. We've gotten to see games launch over the last six years. It's something like, I think it's 12 or 14 percent of games that actually make it past their first year. 

Every game that's built with Solsten, not 74 percent of games since six years ago that have been built with Solsten are still on the market today and growing. So if you want to be the minority... you do want to be the minority in gaming in terms of being successful because it's just not good. It's like all those baby turtles running to the ocean and just a couple make it at the end. That's gaming. 

And so with Solsten, it's the opposite. It's like, Hey, like three fourths of you, not only are going to make it, but you're still going to be making it six years later. Like that's a business. That's a game that stood up. But yeah, I think I've seen like in the last six years, I've seen some of the best games that have been produced also by teams where the person didn't play those types of games, was not that type of person, was not that type of user. And as a result, they went the extra mile to understand and empathize with who they were creating for because they knew they weren't that person. And it actually got better because of it.

I think the most important thing with game team- so we do a team assessment from the kind of HR side of things. It's not our main thing, but what's cool is it places everybody on the team on an innovation curve. So you're actually able to see who are the people that are really good at creating something from nothing. And who are the really good people that are from operating perspective. 

And for smaller game companies, it's one of the most brutal things that a lot of teams don't realize and a lot of founders don't realize is when you go to most of big companies, the teams that are just incredibly good at operating games are not the same teams that are incredibly good at building games from scratch. And so if you're a founder and you're building a game and you build a really amazing game, you're switching into a whole new mindset and a whole new mind frame operating a live service versus building something from the ground up.

So what we recommend doing is, taking that and actually seeing where your team is today and where you land on the innovation curve and where each team member lands on the innovation curve, and that's definitely going to be more, more helpful. And then if you are a person who plays those games all the time, I think those people are beneficial for the team. But if you have a team that's full of those people, really, really bad and a team that you have, none of those people... 

There's some research showing that people who have PhDs, if they have lower levels of openness psychologically, they're far more likely to be biased, and wrongfully biased than people with master's degrees. And the people with master's degrees are more likely to be biased than the people with bachelors, et cetera, et cetera. So sometimes what you know, and what you think you know, can actually be your biggest weakness.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. And I do feel like people want to hire everyone who's just like themself. And then a lot of times you have a whole team and it's all the same genre of person, which is not really helpful. But I watch that all the time. People are like, Oh, this person went to the same school as me. And they think like me and I like this. So it's really hard to break people out of that. 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah, there's a fine balance. Just to speak frankly, we were at one point, I think we had 50 different countries represented within Solsten from a passport perspective. So not like the American, I'm German, I'm Irish, I'm from Uganda, I'm from... it's like, these are 50 different nationalities. And that also poses a lot of challenges in terms of culture and communication. So it's finding that right balance.

Too little diversity is really bad. And when you have way too much to culture and communication, it turns and it can turn into the Tower of Babel. And I literally saw conversations between four people where four people all agreed and said, this sounds great and all went and did different things because they all they spoke the same words. They all had different understandings of what's there. 

So what we found was looking at the cognitive side of it was really impactful and powerful. We do personality assessments with most people at the company. It's such an incredible tool. Like it's one of the best tools we have for self actualization and learning about ourselves. And what's amazing to see is that, we know that engineering at Solsten, if you have higher levels of straightforwardness, you are way more likely to succeed than someone who doesn't have high levels of straightforwardness. And what that does is, it takes a lot of the bias out of the hiring picture, because then we're not looking at where are they from? What degree did they get? We can say, this is something that we know is way more impactful perhaps than the school they went to. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay. How big is the gap between what people say they want from a player perspective versus what it is they actually want?

Joe Schaeppi: It's huge. It's massive. And here's the data behind it. When we do assessments on free to play games, looking at the psychology is what tells you what people, not just what they want, but it tells you what people need. And so that's the most important- what we need is way more important than what we want. And what people want- this is not a part of our psychological assessment, but it's a part of our module. We ask for people's pain points and their hopes and aspirations. 

Lizzie Mintus: Okay. 

Joe Schaeppi: The number one thing people want in games, when it comes to free to play, is either a combination of not having to pay, not having to pay to win. That's just kind of a simple example. Everyone's going to say that. The reality of that is, well, that's how free to play games work. It's almost like it's socialism really. There's a few people that pay for everybody else to play the game. And if you're a developer and nobody pays, there's no game. There's no creativity, there's no money. So when we look at what people want, that's one example.

But when you look at sort of, a step down from that, that's like more just more accessible, if you read reviews. So when you read reviews for games on Apple or whatever, you'll see a lot of players complaining about things or saying what they want. 

Here's a couple of interesting facts. I think, typically some of the worst reviews that are just [very long], that are just complaining about a lot of different things- more often than not, those are some of the most engaged players and some of the highest spenders. And so what we see in games is you don't want happy players and you don't want sad players. You want labile players.

So how engaged we are in something is basically a heartbeat. I had a friend recently, from when I used to be a psychologist, she's like, why is it that the more I love my boyfriend, the more I hate him? And I'm like, well, attachment issues aside, I said, a lot of that really comes down to the fact that the more you care about someone, the more you're engaged in something, the more it can impact you.

And there's a reason why there's certain people that go through their entire life, always keeping intimate relationships at a distance. Because they never want to get hurt and they never want to really feel. It's like, that's a part of loving something. That's a part of being engaged in something.

So just like that with players, with games, when you see a labile nature to that reality- so there's ups, they're really pumped about stuff. They're really happy. And there's downs. They are so pissed at the developer and they're so mad. Well, that's because they care. And because they care, it means they're engaged. So when you look at a lot of those people and what they express that they want.

Let's go back to Children. So, you know, when Children throw tantrums.

Lizzie Mintus: Very well. 

Joe Schaeppi: They're good at, they're very good at it. One of the main reasons they do that is because they don't have the words to express what they need. And so they end up kind of throwing a tantrum or, and what they're really trying to do is get you to feel the way that they feel. So if kids throw a tantrum in a grocery store and you're there, maybe they feel powerless and now you feel pretty powerless because people are staring at you and going, what the heck is this?

Now they achieved their goal. Like, Hey, now you know how I feel, which is very immature. Obviously we hope people grow out of that stage as adults, not all do. But that being said, gamers, it's sometimes no different because they don't have access to developers. They can't just say, Hey, I've invested a lot of time in this game and I really care about it. And you just changed a bunch of stuff. And it's really kind of pissing me off. 

And devs, honestly, they work so hard and they're grinding and they don't know. And then they read a bunch of communications and sometimes it's from that player that's like the really, really loud minority. And maybe we look them up and they're a big spender. And now they start making changes that are really bad for actually the happy majority of players. And you see that that's becoming less and less. I think most developers have caught onto that now, but it still happens. 

 There's two parts to that. So that's one part of the, what we want saga. The other part of the, what we want saga is why psychological assessment is so important. And that is that human beings are very poor observers of our own cognition.

Joe Schaeppi: Our brain is bad at observing itself. And so what that means is we're also poor observers of not just our needs, but also our wants. And our wants can be very emotionally, biologically driven in the moment and it's not what's going to sustain us. We all have a friend or hopefully not a friend but or know somebody who's very like impulsive And that's a person that lives on wants. And you can see how they live their life. They make kind of bad decision after bad decision. And if you as a friend feed into that impulsivity or feed into their wants, that relationship is definitely going to burn out. It's just not going to go well. 

And so what we want to do is, we want to do need identification, which comes from understanding the core psychology of that person, including Solsten measures mental health attributes as well, like social wellbeing, psychological wellbeing, physiological wellbeing. 

If your game is actually making those scores go down, you are going to churn that person out a hundred percent. It doesn't matter how much they've spent in the game. What you want to do as a game is make something that's sustainable for somebody. So engaging, yes. 

Back to relationships, think of how many people are like, yeah, I'm in this amazing relationship. It's just not engaging at all though. It's so healthy and not engaging. That's not good. Engagement's a good thing. Addiction's a bad thing. So, same thing- think of relationships where somebody's so invested. It's, it's just obsessive. Like we've all seen friends go down that path too.

But again, bad at observing their own cognition. So they're in it. They don't know they're in it, but you know it's going to end poorly. It's something's going to have to change at some point. It's not sustainable. And games are the same. So games are so immersive that you can take a lot of the metaphors for human relationships. And you can apply them to to gaming. 

And so what we want to do to actually understand what players want, what they need is look at their psychology. And then from there, and then look at their kind of health scores. And then from there, we're in a really good position to build out the features, the mechanics, the economy, the gameplay.

The ads, that's one of the most important parts of it to connecting your gameplay to your advertisements. So that's one funnel. But doing that in a way that's going to be not just sustainable, we like to think of it in terms of regenerative, like do I get more from it than I put in. And what you'll see is we measure something called a player centered score. So the higher that number goes, the more regenerative your game is for that player, the more money they spend on your game over time. 

Those two things, like after six years now, that score, 100 percent of the time. It's never been once where it hasn't worked. Predicts the LTV of the player. So if your game's really healthy for a person, and there's other people that are spending more, and they have a lower player-centered score, what we know is that in six years from now, the person with the higher player centered will outspend that big spender in that first year because it's more sustainable for them. So yes, so that's kind of the two parts. It's a good question. And it doesn't just apply to games. That's life in general. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. I feel like your product could be applied to so many places. Okay. I want to talk about the upcoming release of your database. Can you please elaborate?

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah. We're pumped. The state of the player, I think is like a little teaser at that, because it's kind of the idea of like data at scale, what can you do? So our database is something we call a navigator. It's the result of six and a half years of being a psychological assessment and some of the largest and also smallest games in the world, and being able to understand humanity at scale. Our database is basically, it's representative of 250 countries and territories in the world, which is all of them essentially. It's representative of humanity. 

There's 3.1 billion people playing games in the world. Only 4 billion people have smartphones. So if you were like aliens, you came to earth today and they're like, I want to understand people. This is what this is. It's the very first on demand human audience database. So you can go into it, if you go to navigator.solsten.io, where we're in our beta for it. So if you go there, you can search it, search a brand, search an interest category, like anything you can imagine.

We were talking to a company last week who was like, Yeah, we're really interested in people that like rodeos. I think from their product perspective, that was really important to them. You go in, you type rodeos, there's the audience of people that like rodeos and you can segment that globally, demographically, like kind of any way you might want to imagine.

Like we only want to look at people that like rodeos in Connecticut versus Texas. And are rodeo people in Connecticut different than Texas rodeo people? And then you can see the Harry Potter groups. You can see their personality. You can see their traits, all the things that really make you understand the why behind that person.

To me, I think it's something really incredible. Like it's the first time in the history of the world where people have access to a tool where we can instantly start to understand each other. And that's powerful. I could instantly go, why are those people like that? Well, I can go on Navigator. I could get that audience and I could see it. And I think the point is, from a snap observation perspective as humans, we try to understand people are different groups than us through kind of what we know in our frame of reference.

Lizzie Mintus: I feel like less every day, but yes.

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah, we're not very good at it. Even if you look at anthropology as a academic practice, that is the whole practice of how do, especially cultural anthropology, how do we as humans understand people from the past or from the present that are the other that are not us.

And you have all these things like participant observation and cultural relativism and all these methods and tools of like trying to remove your subjectivity from what you're doing. And what's cool about psychological assessment is the traits that exist today in modern psychology are human traits.

They're not like, you know, Oh, this culture is so different. They have completely different personality traits. No, it's these are human traits. So what it does is it brings humanity to the surface and it empowers us to understand those groups of people. And then from there, I am a firm believer, and this might be a controversial statement, that marketing and advertising is a really good thing, and one day it's going to be an amazing thing.

In the past, it can be annoying. It can be. But there's Ogilvy who founded Ogilvy and Mathers. He has this quote that's like, one day in the future, marketing will be like a gentle tap on the shoulder from a really good friend. 

Lizzie Mintus: I feel like it's getting there. I get Instagram ads that I'm like, This is exactly the thing that I wanted and you presented it to me. That's so cool. 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah, they're getting better Instagram still totally operates off of relevance. You just sometimes get shotgunned with, okay Yeah, I get it. But they don't know your personality. They don't know your psychology.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes You Yes, this is fair. 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah. And the reason why they don't, actually are ahead of research used to be at meta. The reason why they don't is all the texts that you write, everything that you're typing, our words in general are not really indicative of who we are at all. Like, I mean, this might need to get bleeped, but like we had one company that uses a social listening tool and they're like, yeah, we launched this feature and it's getting really negative sentiment.

And we went into the data and it's just all these players saying this is fu***** awesome. This is cool. Just saying whatever. And they look back at it and they're like, Oh, they're picking up F words as a negative sentiment type thing. Or if you look at two players, say like one says, fu** you. The other says, fu** you. This is literally a real case that we saw. Cause we track language too, because it's interesting, but it's not as useful as the psychology stuff. 

And these two players, their buddies, engagement went up, their friends. One got reported for harassment, but the same exact language. And so language is just so nuanced and there's so much meaning behind it. So that's part of why that's all Instagram really has to go off of or Facebook is your language. And then what you post and back to what you post behaviors, like all over the place. It's very low signal. And so, yeah, they're not at a point when you'll know they're at a point where they're looking at resonance and not relevance when it's something that you're not doing. You haven't thought of it, it's that delightful moment. 

Oh, I wasn't talking about this. I wasn't writing about it. And that's really interesting. And they don't do a lot of things. They do one thing because that's the ad blindness part, like less advertising is better. And that's part of why I believe in the future of advertising is way more about resonance, not relevance. And Hey, we can get it there, I think. And this is part of how it gets there. And that would save a lot of people, a lot of time in terms of getting us to what we need, not what we want or what is being pushed on us or things like that.

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. Okay. I have one last question. Before I ask, I want to point people to your website, Solsten, solsten.io.

The last question for any listeners who are at the baby stage of starting a company or want to start a company, what advice do you have, besides you Solsten obviously, on just from your own journey? Like what are some lessons you can share? What is something that you wish you knew when you started your own company? 

Joe Schaeppi: I'm sorry, I'm going to break the rule. I would use Solsten. 

Lizzie Mintus: Not a rule. You're not a real follower. Sean Keane. 

Joe Schaeppi: No. And that's, I think that's maybe a second piece of advice too. So on the first one, and here's where I'm going with this is the number one reason why all businesses fail. If we look at the fortune 500 list today, go back 50 years and about half those companies are no longer companies. These are companies that thought they were invincible. And the number one reason why all businesses fail is they didn't understand their audience well enough. And well enough is the exact point.

Like Kodak, they knew that there was digital SLR cameras. And they're like, yeah, we know our audience way better than Nikon does. We know them way better than Canon does, like well enough. So you can never understand an audience well enough, just like all the research out there that shows like that. If you have children, you can never say I love you enough to them.

You just can't it's so powerful. So understanding your audience from the start, the total addressable market. Really doing good market sizing and not just throwing up their demographics and their behaviors, but really understanding them from a psychological perspective. And if you don't have the resources to use a company like Solsten there's a lot of material that's on the internet or even like on our website that says, here's things you can do to do that if you don't have the money or if you don't get accepted into one of our accelerator programs that we do with startups. So I'd say that's one.

And then two, and it's definitely not the path for everybody, but companies that are evolutions and revolutions. And I think you have to decide what you're going to do. Evolutions can have exits. They can be things that you don't really care about or don't really believe in. It's still going to take a significant amount of time, but you can make an evolution and you can make money doing it. I also believe that if your goal is to make money and you're a founder, you're an idiot. It's going to fail. 

Lizzie Mintus: You'll fail a hundred percent. You don't care. Yeah, I agree. 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah. And even if you do make money, there's just a lot of better ways to make money, like a lot of better ways to make money.

Lizzie Mintus: Yes. 

Joe Schaeppi: And so as a passion driven, product led vision based company, the gift, just in terms of life quality and sustained happiness and joy, like many things, if we look at the history of Solsten, like that was my life. 

I'm like, how do you use technology to basically do what a therapist does? Or how do you architect space in a way that it's healthy for people that it actuates their human potential? My whole career, I remember being told by a head of HR at a gaming company that my resume was not linear. And I said, it's not linear to you. 

Lizzie Mintus: If that's a great reply. 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah. Have you understood what vision I'm following, what path I'm following and the unfolding of that. And I think if you look at the lot of the greatest companies in the world, they started with a purpose. And Steve jobs said this, he's like, it's going to get so hard sometimes that if you don't have that connection, if it's not a part of your, why, your raison d'etre, you're going to give up. There are people that I've seen some founders make it. They're just mental. Like they don't care about the business, but they just keep going. And a lot of those people though, they're burned out and miserable by the time they exit. And I've seen that every time. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. That's great advice. Thank you. I learned so much. 

Joe Schaeppi: I'll go with those two. 

Lizzie Mintus: Yeah. No, that's great. And I appreciate you bringing the rules. We've been talking to Joe Schaeppi, who is the CEO and co-founder of Solsten. Joe, where can people go to learn more about you and your product and or work for you? 

Joe Schaeppi: Yeah, Solsten.io. Highly recommend that if you go to the drop-down where it says navigator or navigator.solsten.io, that's going to be really coming to life over the next few months to the point where you're going to be able to talk to audiences too. So that's going to be super cool. 

And yeah, this podcast has been amazing, but if you're interested in other stuff and you just Google my name, there are some other things like Deconstructor of Fun type things, different topics that I talk about. I think people seem to find them interesting so that'd probably be a quick way. 

And yeah, happy if you add me on LinkedIn or Twitter, and message me. I'm usually pretty responsive. Happy to chat as well. 

Lizzie Mintus: Thank you. 

Joe Schaeppi: Yep. Thank you.

Thanks so much for listening to the show this week. To catch all the latest from Here's Waldo, you can follow us on LinkedIn. Be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes. We'll see you next time.